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Is Plex really Self Hosting? (piefed.zip)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I've been thinking about this more and more. According to the sidebar, this community is "A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control." Based on that I don't think Plex qualifies.

Privacy: Plex clearly records the metadata of what you watch. When I used it, it would send me a report by email of what my "friends" were watching. Even with that turned off, their services still track telemetry.

Control: Plex has all of it. They can (and do) make unilateral changes to the service, how authentication works, where you can run it, etc.

So I ask, when you are hosting something that is entirely dependent on a commercial entity to function, is Plex really selfhosting in the spirit of this community?

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[–] 20 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

The description of this community is not a hard rule written in stone, and I would treat it as more of a vibe than a criteria.

If you want to take it literally, then yes, Plex doesn't count, neither does cloudflare or wordpress. And many other proprietary systems commonly used by the self hosting community.

But I think the spirit of this community is a bit more loose, and there is room for the likes of Plex.

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